The varied streams of reasoning

A daily quiz question mail-list sent a question with three pictures, asking us to give a connect between the three. I found that the first two pictures just gave away the connect. The first was a picture of Stephen King, second was a picture of Rita Hayworth. To anybody who has watched The Shawshank redemption, this would be a piece of cake. I guessed the third picture to be Frank Darabont, which was probably inferred from the fact, that I know Stephen King and Rita Hayworth connect only for this movie and the other closest connect I can find is Frank Darabont. It turned out to be right when I verified my thoughts.

What exactly triggered my brain to give the answer as Frank Darabont. At a mathematical level I'd say that the intersection of {King,Hayworth,The Shawshank Redemption} can lead me to certain connects like {Morgan Freeman,Bob Gunton, Frank Darabont,...}. Now I know that the third picture is not Bob Gunton or Morgan Freeman because I know how they look like. So the only possible connect here was Darabont. While we can mathematically eliminate a set of choices, the visual recognition also plays a huge part in the final elimination here. Yesterday's question was similar. I had to look at an epitaph of a young poet to figure out whom the epitaph belonged to. The young poets I knew, who died early in life were {Keats,Wilfred Owen,...}. I decided to look at the date of his death. Now that leads me to only Victorian Era poets. Here the only Victorian Era poet who died and closely resembled the epitaph was Keats. That turned out to be the answer. What amazes me is the fact that so much stimuli are hit upon when our brain is asked to process or deduce an answer. The cognitive processes that follow deal with visual recognition, context understanding, elimination of other choices.

These are minimal observations from somebody who also is a budding practitioner of Artificial Intelligence, but the questions these observations throw are mind boggling. How do I for example build a simple reasoning engine which can also accumulate knowledge. From the previous examples the accumulating knowledge part was how Frank Darabont and Keats get added to the brain. Now they are stored permanently in my brain and probably would serve for future knowledge gathering.

As Steven Pinker put it, The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted – recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question – in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived.... As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come